


where heaven meets earth

by robotsdontcry



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:00:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23636434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/robotsdontcry/pseuds/robotsdontcry
Summary: At thirteen, Claude is convinced that fate and gods do not exist. If he must have faith, it’s in the steady march of the moon and stars across the night sky, the assurance that the sun will rise every morning. No just god would turn a blind eye to human cruelty. He picks himself up and keeps running, fighting, watching his own back because no one else will.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	where heaven meets earth

The arched windows in the reading room offer a sweeping view of the night sky and shadowy swaths of desert beyond the palace walls. From his place on the sofa, Claude listens to his mother read about tales of faraway lands, a dragon goddess who creates and destroys, deeds both heroic and evil. They’re unlike any Almyran fable he’s ever heard, where humans coexist with dragons and the land and sea have personalities of their own. _Is the goddess real?_ he asks, wide-eyed.

Her laugh is loud and unrestrained, the kind that turns heads in the streets. She reaches over to ruffle his hair roughly. It’s a rare display of affection, and Claude squirms away in protest. Just two days ago, she’d stood by and watched him squirm in front of a target while his combat instructor aimed an arrow at the wood two inches from his right ear. They’d kept going for hours until he learned not to flinch.

 _That’s for you to find out,_ she says.

His mother says everyone on earth sees different fragments of the same night sky. Outside, the moon is a round milky thing in the darkness. It pins him under its unblinking gaze, and he cannot look away. As his mother continues to read about four saints and a holy war, Claude commits the position of each star to memory, tucking them away in his mind. The image of the sky stays with him long after he’s gone to bed, an incessant stream of thoughts running and tripping over one another. This, he soon learns, is to be the first of many sleepless nights.

-

He finds the young wyvern huddled among the roots of an oak tree. The wyverns that guard the palace gates and roam free in the wild are dark and powerful, but this one is a pearly white. She raises her head and hisses at him as he approaches, but Claude doesn’t miss the way she protects her left side, where patches of dirt and blood cover her scales.

“Hey,” he soothes. “It’s alright. I’m not going to hurt you.”

The wyvern’s eyes are a piercing gold, evaluating his every move. She lets out a snarl when he tries to move closer. 

“Stay right here,” Claude says after a moment. “I’ll be right back.”

Midday sun filters through the trees. He’d snuck away from combat practice to wander through the woods, climbing trees to survey the surrounding landscape and snacking on fresh fruit hanging from branches. By now Claude’s painfully aware that his royal title doesn’t spare him from the strict training regimen forced upon all Almyran youth. At dawn, he rises from his bunk and rides with his cohort into the grasslands, where land stretches flat and unforested for miles. Once they reach the woody patches scattered across the base of the mountains, his mornings are spent getting thrown off horses; his afternoons, practicing swordplay and firing arrow after arrow at a target until his arms shake from exhaustion. 

His skin is a shade lighter than that of the other youth, his build more agile and slender. His eyes are a shock of green in a sea of hazel and chestnut. His eyesight is keen, he’s a quick thinker and a nimble tree-climber, but in his country these characteristics are rejected as those of cowards. What really matters is whether you can face your opponent head-on in the plains, where there’s nowhere to run or hide.

When Claude returns to the oak tree with a handful of freshly picked figs, the wyvern is still there. He sits down in the dirt, careful to maintain a safe distance. The wyvern’s sharp eyes follow his movements suspiciously, but she moves forward to snatch a fig off his open palm. With the help of the figs, Claude manages to inch forward over the next fifteen minutes until he’s close enough to see the injury. 

Her left wing is torn and bloody, the wound bearing the unmistakable mark of wyvern claws. Then he understands. 

“You, too?” he murmurs.

The wyvern, now comfortable in his presence, watches him silently.

“Let’s be friends,” Claude decides. “I’ll call you Farida.”

Farida bows her head and quietly accepts the name.

“Oh! I haven’t introduced myself yet, have I?” He reaches out for a handshake, but she only stares at him blankly. It was worth a shot. “I’m Claude. Nice to meet you.”

Farida makes a snuffling noise. Encouraged, Claude leans forward conspiratorially. “Hey, guess what my mom said to Nader yesterday.” 

He spends the next hour sitting cross-legged at the base of the tree, chatting with his new companion while she reciprocates with soft sounds. Based on Farida’s responses, he gathers enough to learn that she’d been separated from her parents when she was learning to fly. Huh, he thinks. Sounds familiar.

The sky is darkening. It’s gotten late and he’s out of figs, and he has to rejoin the others. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he promises.

Claude returns to the woods every day for the next week. It’s worth the resulting scolding and occasional beating to hear Farida’s cry of joy when he comes back. He learns to decipher her noises: a screech could mean either anger or laughter depending on the pitch, a soft whining translates into sadness. 

Once her wing heals, he places her on a branch and watches her take off like a proud parent. He doesn’t see her again after that.

-

On nights he can’t sleep, Claude climbs out of a window in the barracks and dangles his feet off the ledge, where he can look down at the sleeping city. The marketplace, usually filled with shouts piercing the dry summer air and the aroma of freshly cooked meat and colorful flags hanging above busy streets, is silent and empty. From his perch on the ledge, the labyrinth of the city unfolds brick by brick before him. There’s the stall that sells fresh lamb skewers. There’s the stall with the best ingredients for mixing poisons, the one with the best hiding place from children throwing sticks. The stall with the fortune-teller, who traced his palm in exchange for a gold coin and proclaimed him a restless wanderer.

At age five, Almyran youth are taught three things: to ride a horse, to draw a bow, and to speak the truth. They learn how to fire an arrow at an apple hanging from a tree across the river, but not to survive on the streets; to defend themselves from weapons but not from words.

At thirteen, Claude is convinced that fate and gods do not exist. If he must have faith, it’s in the steady march of the moon and stars across the night sky, the assurance that the sun will rise every morning. No just god would turn a blind eye to human cruelty. He picks himself up and keeps running, fighting, watching his own back because no one else will.

-

The earring is polished to gleaming, three thin rings clinking against a golden hoop. The man presenting it to him is large and battle-scarred, face framed by dark hair and beard, eyes warm with pride.

“I present to you,” Nader says, turning around to face the crowd standing before them, “the crown prince of Almyra, no longer a boy but a man.”

Two weeks ago, Claude had been sent into the wilderness armed with only a horse, a sword, and a bow and arrows for his coming-of-age ceremony. He’d ridden across miles of open grassland, climbed up the side of a mountain, swam across rivers, hunted for food, huddled in rock shelters at night. When he reappeared on the other side, weak and bone-tired, he’d fought his combat instructor in a duel. The final test was simple, a mere formality: hitting a dozen targets on horseback a hundred meters away. 

Now he’s standing in front of the palace, where ordinary citizens gather with the most elite warriors in the nation to watch as Nader pierces his ear with a needle and inserts the gold earring. There’s no love in their eyes, but a grudging respect. Claude can live with that. A feast will be held before the end of the day, where speeches are made and wine is drunk. Then he’ll be an adult at last: allowed to marry, drink, and participate in fights to the death. 

“Good job, kiddo!” Nader nearly shouts above the roar of the crowd, where cheers and applause mix with shouted insults. “For a moment I thought you wouldn’t make it out of the mountains alive.”

“Oh, come on,” Claude says. “Have some faith in me, will you?”

“I do, believe me,” Nader replies, serious for once. “I’m just having my fun with you. This is my last chance, you know.”

Claude makes a face. “So what, you’re gonna start treating me like royalty now?”

The man just laughs heartily and pounds him on the back. “I didn’t say that,” he says. “But I _am_ proud of you, kiddo.”

The summer air is sweltering, noise deafening. Claude turns to find three generations of Almyran royalty standing in the palace pavilion, columns on either side, where colonnades lead past lush gardens and clear pools. His half-siblings and cousins don’t bother hiding their contempt; his aunts and uncles and grandparents show no emotion. But beside them, his mother wears a small smile, and his father gives him a nod.

-

And yet—

Even as he continues to train, rises through the ranks of the military academy and earns respect for his quick thinking and strategic prowess, he hungers for just a glimpse of another world. The other side, the promised land, where the land is greener, the rivers empty out into the sea, and the valleys teem with strange and captivating creatures. It whispers to him with an urgency he can no longer ignore. The ache in his bones, ancient and ceaseless, keeps him guarded by day, restless by night.

When he turns fifteen, Claude smuggles himself onto a transport ship headed for Derdriu and doesn’t look back.

Fodlan is green. The first thing Claude notices, after getting caught escaping off the ship and running through the streets of an unfamiliar city until he loses his pursuers, is the lush sloping hills in the distance. The forested mountains. The salty ocean breeze. This must be Leicester territory, he figures, though he can’t quite register the thought that he must one day inherit the throne to this foreign country.

He has no money. He’d learned how to speak in the Fodlan tongue growing up, but his Almyran accent is thick and the people of Fodlan are less kind than he’d imagined. He’s turned away from several inns before stumbling upon an abandoned alley where he can shelter behind a stack of wooden crates. Sleeping on the streets isn’t new to him; his peers had kicked him out of the barracks too many nights to count. Despite his physical exhaustion, Claude lies wide awake that first night. Looks to the moon and stars, as always, for answers. It’s the same sky as the one he’s ever known, but tonight the moon is obscured by clouds.

-

Given his Crest, it doesn’t take long for Claude to prove he’s the legitimate heir of House Riegan to his grandfather and the other lords at the Roundtable. After that, he has plenty of time to put his new people skills to use at the Officers Academy. 

He’d never expected Fodlan nobles to be so prissy. Save for sharp-tongued Felix Fraldarius, the other noble youth speak smoothly and eloquently, their perfect manners no doubt refined by years of etiquette lessons. Their pale skin has never seen the desert sun; their hands are free of callouses from gripping a bow for hours on end. They don’t know the meaning of a real feast; they don’t give thanks to the land before meals.

Claude’s never had friends his age, but he needs people he can use. He perfects the art of conversation, directing questions toward others while expertly dodging any inquiries into his own life. He earns a reputation for charisma, for his easygoing manner of speech. But even as he becomes increasingly popular as the leader of the Golden Deer House, he keeps his distance from fully integrating—he spends more time with commoners than nobles, takes afternoon naps in the gardens, calls the Professor “Teach” while other students gape. 

All things considered, it doesn’t take long for his mother’s old stories about the creator goddess to resurface from his memories. The academy is run by the church, after all. What surprises him is that people actually believe in what he’d always considered nonsense. He can’t quite wrap his mind around the fact that people as thoughtful and observant as Mercedes can also be so devout.

Of all the people at the monastery, Cyril is the most perplexing. By now Claude prides himself on being able to read people, but this boy is the one puzzle he can’t quite solve. His undying devotion to Rhea, his inability to recognize Claude’s true identity, his barely-concealed disdain for Almyrans. Claude’s the one who ran away from home, but even he feels the inescapable tug of loyalty towards a country that Cyril speaks about with total indifference. 

Whether he likes it or not, it’s not as easy to leave Almyra behind as he expected. Every morning he rises early to do the braid in his hair and polish his earring. He finds himself returning to the old tracks, well-worn and familiar, carved into his heart.

At Garreg Mach, knowledge is at his fingertips. His favorite spot in the library is the table in the northeast corner, partially obscured by bookshelves, where he can gaze out the window when his eyes grow tired of the candlelight. He spends sleepless nights poring over books and ancient texts, with an insatiable curiosity and a hunger for knowledge. Astronomy organizes the stars into constellations. Chemistry provides a basis for magical spells. History gives him a glimpse into the roots of prejudice. Everywhere he turns, he finds patterns, order, things that simple reasoning can prove. Finally a way to make sense of the world, to stride straight into the heart of chaos with logic under his possession.

There’s a moment, surrounded by texts on Fodlan-Almyran relations, immersed in the warm golden candlelight burning on his desk, when his long-standing dream feels within reach. A world without borders, where people can come and go as they please, where languages mingle freely in the marketplace and in homes.

He lets the idea sit for no more than a minute. _Not yet_ , says a voice in the back of his head, and Claude listens to it. Not yet. There is something missing, though he can’t quite name just what it might be.

-

Unexpectedly, he runs into Hilda in the library after dinner one evening. She’s bent over a disarray of papers scattered across the table, writing furiously. Claude watches for a moment, amused, before taking a seat beside her. Besides the two of them, the only other person in the library is Linhardt, but he’s asleep. 

“I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen you here,” he says, eyebrows raised.

Hilda nearly jumps out of her seat. She then delivers a swift punch to his arm, which, true to her nature, hurts like hell. “Don’t scare me like that, Claude!” 

“Ow! Sorry, sorry.” Claude raises both hands in surrender. “Next time I promise to make as much noise as I can.”

“Ugh, you’re impossible.”

“So I’ve been told,” he says, and drapes a lazy arm over the back of his seat. “Anyway, what are you up to? Are you actually studying, Hilda?”

“Nope, I’m not a nerd like you,” is the automatic reply. Claude frowns but decides, albeit grudgingly, to let this one go. “Sorry to disappoint, but I’m just writing a letter to my brother.”

“Ah,” Claude says, the name immediately springing to mind. Nader had mentioned him a couple of times during training, referred to him as the scrawny light-skinned general across the border who’d somehow managed to get the best of him. If he’s anything like Hilda, Claude wouldn’t dare go within a fifty-meter radius of the man. “General Holst.”

“I wish he’d leave me alone,” Hilda complains. “He’s so nosy! He’s always asking me what I’m doing and who I’m spending my time with _._ ”

Claude grins. “C’mon, fess up. What’d you write about me? Do I want to know?”

Hilda Valentine Goneril, always an easy target, throws her pen at him. He catches it easily. “ _Claude!_ What makes you assume I told him about you?”

“Hey, I get it,” says Claude, and presents the pen to her with a flourish, “I _am_ your brilliant house leader, after all. You must have mentioned me at least once.”

“Maybe I have, but that’s none of your business.” Hilda snatches the pen back, the letter forgotten. Her tone grows serious. “Anyway, Holst’s letters haven’t been too cheerful lately. He says the Almyrans have been starting border skirmishes.”

Claude shrugs. “I’m not surprised.” His countrymen are always eager to prove themselves in battle, hungry for tests of strength. They haven’t changed a bit since he left.

“Yeah, they’re an odd bunch,” she says. “You never know what to expect from them. They’re no trouble for my brother, though.”

“I’ll bet. General Holst sounds like a fearsome warrior.”

“Let’s not praise my brother any more than everyone already has.” Hilda frowns. “What about you, though? I’ve never seen you write letters home before.”

“It’s complicated,” Claude says.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what _is_ home, anyway? Is it just the place you were born? Or something else entirely?”

Hilda makes a face. “You’re always making everything so complicated. The way I see it, family is home. It’s simple.”

“Fair enough,” Claude says, and lets it drop. There is a heaviness in the space where his heart should be. What is home? While Hilda goes back to writing her letter, he leaves the table to wander through the stacks, looking for a book to distract himself.

-

Claude observes the other two house leaders closely. Edelgard reminds him of himself: stubborn, ambitious, three steps ahead of everyone else. Her control is absolute, her will indomitable. Only on rare occasions does he manage to ruffle her feathers with an offhanded joke. Claude almost envies her natural leadership, the way her followers flock to her like birds of a feather. He’s had to fight tooth and nail just to earn a scrap of respect from the people around him. Edelgard has only one shortcoming that he’s able to pinpoint, and even that isn’t her fault. Her perspective is limited by the borders separating Fodlan from the outside world; she has no way of knowing what lies beyond.

Dimitri is more difficult to understand. His brute strength on the battlefield is sharply contrasted by his empathy for the downtrodden. There’s a deep sorrow in his eyes even when he appears to be smiling. Some nights, when Claude passes Dimitri’s room on his way back from hunting around the monastery, he hears him turning restlessly in his bed, mumbling to himself. 

Despite his curiosity, Claude keeps his distance from the Blaiddyd heir. Dimitri is too soft, tugging at a part of himself that he’d been told is weak, that he’d trained himself to shut away. Kindness does not keep you alive. The world does not wait for those left behind.

-

The Professor is another enigma he can’t quite figure out. He can tell they’re an outsider the moment he lays eyes on them, and their rough upbringing as a mercenary is obvious. He respects them enough to confess a few of his visions for the future over tea, and marvels when the Professor doesn’t immediately dismiss them as ridiculous. For the first time he feels hope beating its trapped wings in his ribcage. The Professor is reliable, steady, like the map of the stars he knows by heart.

Still, their existence seems impossible. The truth of who they are remains a mystery, immune to the sharp-edged logic that seems to pierce through everything else. Nobody else seems to question why they can wield the Sword of the Creator. Why they disappear in the Sealed Forest and return with changed hair. Why, when Edelgard declares war on the church, they disappear without a trace for five long years.

In retrospect, Claude should’ve seen the war coming. He’d always known that Edelgard was planning something big, but he’d been too focused on gathering his own information about the church and understanding Fodlan politics to pay more attention. His only regret is that he hadn’t talked to her more during their academy days. Their ideals were always more similar than she’ll ever know.

During those five years, he finally claims the title that he’d been both anticipating and dreading. He sits at a table surrounded by Leicester’s most powerful noble families and signs his name on papers declaring that he is the new head of House Riegan and leader of the Alliance. He feels no different from before. As always, he stands in the middle of two sides and is trusted by neither, and barely scrapes by trying to prove his worth as their leader. And still, the person he needs most remains unaccounted for.

Whenever he has the chance, he leaves the capital behind and goes for long rides in the plains, comforted by the steady rhythm of the horse’s movements. He receives letter after letter from his old classmates, keeping him updated on the war effort. Initially Claude pulls out pen and paper and gives the standard replies, but when even Lorenz expresses concern for how he’s doing, he’s forced to confront the terrifying thought that maybe they actually care. Maybe they knew him all along, saw through his schemes more than he’d ever care to admit. But in the past few years the walls have lowered, something has settled into the once-empty space in his chest, and the feeling is altogether not unpleasant. 

Some evenings Claude takes a walk through the streets of Derdriu and listens to a woman play the lute at the street corner. It’s a melancholy tune, the plucking of the strings evoking nostalgia for a place he’d left behind. He offers a few coins to the lute player and promises, _one day_ _I will come back for you._

-

Claude's leaning against the balustrade on the balcony, thoughts tumbling over one another in his head like the waves in the distance. The shawl he'd grabbed hastily from his writing desk does little to protect him against the icy breeze nipping at his face and ears. It doesn’t snow in Derdriu, but winters here are far colder than he's accustomed to. All this time and his body still misses the sweltering Almyran sun.

He’d sent a messenger to Fhirdiad three weeks ago, but there’s been no sign of the man since. Claude doesn’t know what he’s waiting for anymore. Dimitri is rumored to be dead, leaving Faerghus a puppet in the hands of the Empire, and the Alliance itself is dangerously close to civil war. Meanwhile, the Empire keeps getting stronger. Claude isn’t sure how long he’ll be able to keep things together, and as much as he doesn’t believe in gods, now would be the perfect time, if any, for some divine intervention. 

A flash of white in the darkness catches his eye. 

A falling star? Claude blinks, rubs his eyes, and looks harder. There it is again, skimming the surface of the ocean. It’s too close to earth to be a star, and at first he thinks the messenger has finally returned. But as the shape grows larger, there’s the unmistakable screech of a wyvern.

“Farida?” he says into the wintry air, hardly daring to believe it.

She perches on the balustrade, gold eyes gleaming with recognition and affection as she looks down at him. Her scales glimmer silver in the moonlight. 

“It’s really you, isn’t it,” Claude says. “Wow. It’s been a while. Give me a second.”

He doesn’t cry, but his throat feels too heavy to speak. Is this a dream? He turns away to clear his throat, and when he looks back, she is still there. She leans into his touch as he scratches gently behind her ear. Her skin is leathery—and real—beneath his fingertips. “You’ve gotten so big. I can hardly recognize you.”

Farida leans forward to nuzzle his hair. Her low rumble seems to say, _So have you._

“What have you been doing all this time?” Claude asks, wishing Marianne were here to translate. It’s been years since he’s spoken with a wyvern, and he certainly hasn't made a habit of it since then. Before long, though, her high-pitched screeches and soft noises start to make sense. After a long back-and-forth, he learns that she’d left Almyra sometime after he had and flown halfway across the world looking for him.

All those hours of negotiations and tactics meetings he’d sat through this week, and this is what leaves him speechless. 

“Why’d you spend all that time looking for me?” Claude rummages around in his pockets for a snack but comes up empty-handed. “I wish I had something to offer you,” he says, “but Fodlan’s currently in the middle of a war, and somehow I got myself involved.”

Farida tilts her head, watching him intently.

“You should find somewhere safe to go, at least until the war ends. Believe me, I want to go home as much as you do,” he starts, but then he’s knocked off his feet by a sweep of her wings. She glowers down at him.

_Don’t be stupid._

The words couldn’t be clearer if she’d said them aloud. From his place on the floor, Claude laughs, a sudden burst of unrestrained warmth coursing through his veins.

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry,” he concedes. “I’ll make you a promise. Fight alongside me for a little while, and then we can go home.”

-

If it was fate that dictated his path to cross with the Professor’s at the academy, it’s fate that brings them together five years later. By now Claude is at peace with the fact that some things just can’t be explained by any sort of human logic. Five years ago, he wouldn’t have made the trip out to the monastery from Derdriu, where he’s needed to direct troops and receive messages. There had been a brief moment, while he’d been preparing to leave, when he wondered whether the war was getting to him and he was finally losing his senses. 

But then again, he’s always been one to cross dangerous bridges.

The Professor finds him standing in a tower spared by the war, shading his eyes and watching the sun rise in the east, where he imagines he can hear the thundering of hooves, the joyful shouts of children at the marketplace, the lonely melody of a lute. A land he aches for even as he feels acutely the reality that he will never have a place to call home. Since birth his heart has been torn in two.

“My friend,” he says. “Welcome back.”

They sit among the fallen stones and eat some spare food Claude packed for his travels. The Professor is as reticent as ever, saying that they’d been sleeping for five years. Claude would’ve found it absurd if he were talking to anyone else.

The joy of life is in the small miracles, like the fact that the Professor hasn’t aged one bit after their five-year slumber. The world turns, the sun rises and sets, and some things never change. He’s still not a man who believes in gods, but he thinks it might be worth putting his faith in something greater than himself.

“I have a plan. For the future of Fodlan, and beyond,” he says. “But first, I’m counting on you to help us win this war.”

**Author's Note:**

> consider this my love letter to claude (khalid!) von riegan. almyra was heavily based on the achaemenid empire.
> 
> thanks for reading!


End file.
